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Water traced a path down the chain, gathering speed with each link, before hitting Caroline’s hands. There was momentary relief from the strain of having her hands pulled taunt over her head, but that relief was short lived, when the all too familiar bite of vervain burnt her fingertips.
An involuntary hiss escaped from her lips, as Caroline fought the urge to flinch. This entire situation was ridiculous, and she had been awake for about five minutes, trying to understand how she got here—here being not her dorm room in New York City, and why she is here.
Here being a very brightly lit room, with big bay windows bathing Caroline in sun. The bay windows revealed browning grass, from lack of watering, and in the distance mountains with snow covered peaks jutted out of the landscape. No geography that Caroline would be able to identify, even if she knew enough about mountains to know where there were mountains ranges in America.
The room itself was derelict, a kitchen in glory days long past, stuck in a gut job transition that had been abandoned after drywall had been removed at some places, and the appliances removed.
None of this explained the why. The last thing Caroline remembered was taking the E train to a bar in Manhattan that her roommate had suggested, before waking up here. Elena had been pissed that Caroline had switched her enrollment in Whitmore in the last minutes, but after the insanity of their high school graduation, Caroline chose to put herself first.
She wasn’t, as Damon so eloquently put it, “pretending to be human,” in New York. Caroline was clearly a vampire. But it turns out being a vampire in New York City, a city that operates twenty-four-seven, without being tied to a doppelganger, having a Bennet Witch as a best friend and being the Ripper of Monterey’s sober sponsor, is really good.
Caroline has spent almost four years flitting around New York City, becoming part of the Vampire society with vampires of all ages, of whom Mystic Falls just sounds like a place to go for a weekend trip. Concepts of doppelgangers, hybrids and the name Bennet doesn’t mean a lot, for the mundane Vampires Caroline ran with. Which was exactly what she wanted.
The people who seemed to know what was going on in New Orleans, were the ones Caroline avoided. She’s heard whispers of a baby? Kol’s alive and there’s another Mikaelson sibling back from the dead and it’s not the one she knew died a thousand years ago? There’s something called a Tribid? And now everyone is dead?
It sounded like a fever dream, and even with the most of her Mystic Falls hellmouth high school experience, she couldn’t parse out what was real, what was delusional. And with her luck all, all of it was real. The only thing she did know, from phone calls with Bonnie, is that New Orleans was burning. Klaus had an insane temper tantrum that had caused an all-out war, and now it was quiet.
Quiet from Klaus was a double-edged sword and meant nothing.
But still, Caroline hoped that this was an Elena reasoning kidnapping. It only made sense. Caroline’s relationship (if you could call it that), with Klaus was about a year and a half. It ended with a voice mail that made her stomach flutter, like she was on the edge of the Drop Tower waiting for the fall, (good) sex in the forest and a minifridge. Elena, on the other hand, spanned decades and a lot more tragedy (mostly caused by Klaus).
Whoever had kidnapped her had been thorough. Her hands were manacled over her head, where a rusty pipe dripped vervain laced water onto her. Caroline wanted to think that the water dropping was incidental, and not the start of getting water boarded. Her feet were encased in concrete, which had an old school mafia feeling to it; the cement was mostly dry, but she could wiggle her toes in her shoes.
The more concerning aspect was the very sharp, wooden stakes positioned a quarter of an inch around her body, like she was in an iron maiden, missing the suit of armor. Someone had clearly pissed off whoever had kidnapped her—not Caroline. But this was someone who had a lot of paranoia, and a personal grudge against whoever it was.
Which meant the idea of Elena being stuck in more insanity, and thus the reason why Caroline was being hung like a pig in a butcher’s shop was low odds. Caroline had only met one person in her entire life who had courted a reputation such as this.
The people who knew of Klaus’s interest in Caroline were a handful. None who would willingly share that (a nasty voice in her brain, that sounded dangerously like Damon, asked if she was sure, if Damon and Stefan would keep Klaus’s interest in her a secret, if Elena was in danger), and she hadn’t told anyone about Klaus’s proclamation. She had kept that secret to herself, in the deep vault of her mind, to bring out when she was morose, and trying to understand how he was so certain she would come to him—how she could already feel herself drift in his direction.
“You’re awake,” a man with no heartbeat—vampire—stood in the doorway. His hair was long blonde, buzzed on a side, and dressed like he was a DJ in one of those grungy electronic rave clubs that Caroline ventured into once in first year and then never again. His tone was vaguely southern.
“Yup,” she popped the ‘p’, and tugged again at her manacled hands, this time not hissing, as the vervain water hit her skin, burning pockmarks that healed just as quickly. “Who are you?”
He didn’t answer her, but was by her hands almost instantly. He was faster than expected, which generally meant he was older than the greasy twenty-year-old he looked. He roughly grabbed her Daylight ring and peeled it off her finger.
Instantly the sun attacked. Caroline screamed, as the full force of daylight hit her, burning her skin, hitting sinew and bone. She twisted her body every which way, trying to move out of the sun, getting splinters of wood embedded into the bits of flesh that remained.
And then he put the ring back on and threw blood at her face.
Caroline lapped up every drop like a dog, desperate for the relief and the slow healing it provided. She became painfully aware, as the flesh healed, the little splinters from the stakes imbedding into her skin.
“I trust I have your cooperation,” the man said conversationally. Caroline remained mute, anger written in her eyes. This wasn’t the first time she had been tortured by sunlight, and vervain, but the last time Daddy did this, he was trying to be kind in a fucked up way.
This stranger had no desire to be kind; there was no lesson that Caroline was supposed to learn. It was to hurt her.
“Who are you?” She heaved, ignoring his statement.
“Maria Vitebsk,” the man said. His mouth turned up in a cruel smile with the last syllable. The smile transformed his face briefly into a very handsome man, undercut included.
Caroline’s chest heaved, as skin slowly knit itself back together. She was still trying to get any last bit of blood. The name meant nothing to her, but there was a reverence to how he spoke it, cradling Maria’s name like it was something precious. Which was great, because that meant Klaus was completely involved and probably the reason why Maria Vitebsk was dead, and this man was out for revenge.
In Caroline’s very limited dive into Vampire Society, she had learnt Vampires fell into two camps; Camp One were what Caroline (affectionately) called the Sluts. They were the bastions of hedonism, the ones who fucked whoever they wanted, in various states of consent and had no interest in anything but the carnal. From the sidelines, these seemed to be the Vampires who were under five hundred, but over one hundred—they had no more ties to their mortal life, so went wild. Sort of like sheltered kids who went away to college for the first time.
But then there was the other camp. These Vampires tended to be older, stronger with more political ties and power that made Caroline feel like jumping out of her skin. They had spent such a long time alone, often in times when Vampire Hunters were a real threat, and not a TV show that when they had found a companion, they were possessive, obsessive and cruel to whoever dared to interfere with them. Immortality alone would drive anyone mad, and they were old enough to have seen madness destroy friends.
Whoever this man was, Caroline would bet every cent of Bill’s life insurance that he was in the second camp.
“I don’t know who that is,” Caroline said, raspy.
The man’s expression didn’t change, he still stood near her, within grabbing distance, if Caroline’s hands weren’t chained up and her feet weren’t cemented.
“I know,” he said cooly, and yanked the ring off her finger again.
Caroline screamed. There was no moment like a movie where she held her tongue and was defiant in the torture. Nothing like that happened. Caroline screamed until she couldn’t hear herself and then the ring was snapped back on her finger, and blood once again was thrown in her face.
“She died two hundred years before you were born,” the man told her impassively, like he had just turned the porch light on. “Mikaelson killed her, slowly for my transgressions against him.”
Caroline breathed heavily, trying to calm herself. Her lips were blistering, healing slowly. She wanted to protest, argue that she hadn’t seen Klaus in years and it’s not fair that she’s still Klaus bait. He had a baby—maybe, and while Caroline wasn’t going to offer the baby in exchange for her freedom, whoever birthed the baby probably was more important than Klaus.
“What did you do?” She spat instead, the burns inside her mouth closing painfully.
“We were on different sides for the Muscovite-Lithuanian Wars,” the man said simply. Caroline blinked, her brain hazy but even if she wasn’t being tortured, that was no way Caroline would know anything about that. She didn’t even know what countries were involved in those wars, or if they still existed. “He killed her slowly. Let a werewolf bite her, healed her and then have the wolf bite her again. Mikaelson held her for a year, compelling her to stay there, and relive it everyday, and that I had abandoned her. When he finally killed her, the maid was compelled to tell me every second of what he did.”
The ring came off again. The sun burnt her. Caroline twisted into the stakes surrounding her body, pushing wood closer to her heart. Eventually, right at the point when the pain became too much, and it was only a breath before she gave up, the ring would go back on. He’d throw blood on her face—sometimes there was vervain mixed in the blood, just to throw her off. The Vampire didn’t say anything after telling her how Klaus tortured that woman.
A year held captive, compelled to relive torture constantly, thinking your lover abandoned you. The Vampire had spoken so evenly, as if he had been telling her the plot of a book he had read a long time before, and mildly enjoyed at a party. The anger that man held over Klaus, the justifiable anger was not bubbling up into impulse, but calculated movements designed to cut Klaus deeper and deeper each time.
“Why me?” She asked finally, the burns on the side of her body not healing fully at all anymore. There was not enough blood to heal the continuous damage from the mouthfuls she got.
“The blonde in New Orleans was a distraction; her death is enough to hide you’re missing for at least a week,” he told her. “He’s open about her, but you…the only people who know about you have died.”
Abstract thoughts flitted through Caroline’s head as the sun began to wane. Who was the blonde in New Orleans? How many people did he kill to keep Caroline a secret? She’s not clear, even in her own thoughts, who she was referring to as he.
Did Klaus kill anyone who looked into Mystic Falls and found out about Caroline in some misguided idea of romance? Or was it Klaus’s extraordinary paranoia about people knowing his past, and about the Stakes that drove it?
Or was it this man, who was so thorough on his revenge that he tracked down and killed everyone who knew about her and Klaus, so there was no one to alert Klaus that she had gone missing?
Caroline wasn’t as close with Elena as she used to be, but they still shared their locations with each other because of a habit of getting kidnapped, forced that as a safety precaution. Liz would tell someone if Caroline missed a good night text—they were still working on being better at phone calls, but every night Caroline would text her mother good night, and she would wake up to a good morning text from Liz. Someone would notice.
Someone had to notice.
He left the room when it became night, but not before giving her a bag of blood that had been out all day in the sun, gone bad. Caroline was not naive enough to think it was out of the goodness of his heart, but instead to make sure she didn’t die too soon.
Sleep didn’t come, and the morning was a repeat of yesterday, except the man was silent. The days fell into a routine, where they blurred and while Caroline screamed, she never called out for Klaus or begged the man to stop. Klaus wasn’t going to come, and she wasn’t going to give the man satisfaction.
She hoped Maria also didn’t cry out for him when Klaus was torturing her.
At one point, she tried turning off her humanity, hoping that would distance the pain. It didn’t. Being burnt alive, with wood inching closer and closer to her heart hurt the same whether she gave a shit about anyone or not.
It all blurred, and the stale blood at night was the only reprieve, where Caroline sometimes felt strong enough to kick away at the cement, slowly freeing her feet. It was also when she thought about what happened next, if the Vampire was going to keep her alive for a year, like Maria was. Or if he was going to kill her when he tired of her.
If he got tired of his revenge.
Truly, Caroline didn’t think she would get tired of her revenge if someone killed the only person who kept her sane over eternity. (She didn’t like how her thoughts drifted to Klaus there, and the traitorous thought—would Klaus get his revenge for her.)
It was the sound of a door opening, hinges creaking and the wood bouncing off the wall that gave Caroline some hope. It was the first new noise she had heard.
The Vampire—who had never in all these days designed to tell her his name—smiled. It was slow, cruel and made him look like the villain you were supposed to hate in a teen network show.
“Looks like he realized you were missing, Caroline.” He yanked the ring off her finger, letting the sun hit her fully.
Her eyes widened, as the vervain pooled on her fingers. She tried to stop the scream. He was talking purely to antagonise Klaus. “The dead woman kept him busy for far longer than I thought, for a man who calls himself your last love. I suppose he never promised you’d be his.”
The words cut harder than Caroline ever thought they would. He was right, Klaus hadn’t promised she would be his last love. They hadn’t exactly discussed any of this, with him leaving Mystic Falls and then whatever the fuck was going on in New Orleans. Caroline hadn’t reached out when she moved to New York City, content on doing college and trying to figure out what she wanted to do, where did she want to fall in the Supernatural community. She’s had a lot of shit to deal with that from what she’s heard most Vampires don’t deal with in centuries.
She figured there was time. Time for her to figure out if Klaus was the boogeyman or just Elena’s villain. Time to figure out if he was just an older guy saying all the right words, and she was just an eighteen-year-old whose entire experience with boys were the boys she was in kindergarten with. Time to decide if she wanted him to be her last love.
The door to the room slammed open, and there was a blur where the Vampire was no longer standing but almost imbedded in the wall. Caroline blinked hard, trying to focus through the pain, where she thought she could see Klaus.
But then there was a ring on her finger, and Klaus was beside her. His blonde curls, messy from his speed. The angle of his face still sharp, righteous fury all over his face.
“Sweetheart,” he said softly. Caroline blinked. Klaus broke the chains over her head easily, yanking her out of the cement boots. He caught her dead weight easily, letting her sink into him. “You need blood.”
Caroline nodded, her chest heaving, as she tried to stand on her own. Klaus offered her his wrist, and she took it greedily. She drank for a bit, before Klaus gently freedom himself. The Vampire had come to, slowly, pulling himself out of the wooden sharpenal.
“Algirdas,” Klaus growled, guttural and low. She had only heard Klaus sound this furious once before, when Kol had died.
A name, the vampire, Algirdas, stood up. The damage on his body healing already, looking at Klaus like he was thrilled he had showed up. Algirdas was taller than Klaus, but broader. He was old, powerful too, enough so that all the years between them, Klaus still recognized him.
“No,” Caroline hissed as Klaus reached forward, his hand penetrating Algirdas’s chest. “He’s mine.” Her voice was scratchy, worn was screaming and tight from lack of hydration.
Klaus paused, his whole hand still in Algirdas’s chest. He turned to face her, his pupils wide with gold and black, twinned together.
“Are you sure love?”
Caroline nodded. Klaus broke Algirdas’s neck instead.
Caroline didn’t remember the journey from the rundown torture room, to the car. She barely remembered the car ride, where Klaus gave bag after bag of blood, his arms around her, fingers running down her arms as sores heal, and through her matted greasy hair.
She did, however, remember the hotel penthouse bathroom, and the long hot shower. Klaus hovered by the threshold, as if Caroline would be transported back into that hellhole if he lost sight of her.
She remembered the blood he warmed up in a microwave, and how she fell asleep naked in a king size bed, with Klaus’s fingers running down her spine.
When she woke up, Caroline felt like a whole new person. Klaus’s hand was around her waist, and he was lounging in bed.
Klaus noticed the change in her breathing, “Good morning Love,” he murmured, setting the book he had been reading down. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I was used as bait and revenge because you killed some guy’s girlfriend a million years ago.” Caroline said, watching as the softness in Klaus’s eyes turn harsh for a moment, before his anger got under control. “When was the Muscovite-Lithuanian Wars?” she asked mindlessly. Caroline was a queen of compartmentalisation, and she wanted to keep the little bit of calm before they had to face the ugly truth of the past few…days? Weeks?
“That?” Klaus sounded surprised at the question and paused for a moment to think. “Algirdas and I first clashed in…1368, I believe? He burnt my house in Moscow.”
“And you kidnapped his wife and had her bitten by a werewolf every full moon, healed her and made her relive that every day for a year because he burnt your house down?”
“No,” Klaus laughed. His fingers running down her spine drew sparks of electricity. They had never been like this, never cuddled, lounging in a bed. “Although, maybe subconsciously. Algirdas has always wanted more power than he should, and was always vicious about it. Maria encouraged him.”
“So you killed her.”
The silence was small. Klaus didn’t deny his actions, centuries before Caroline was born and Caroline didn’t expect him to. The world was big, and contained multitudes and the man cuddling her tenderly, like she was the most precious thing in the world, was also the man of so many people’s nightmares—her best friend being one of them.
“I misjudged back then,” Klaus cleared his throat. “I thought her death would hurt him, infuriate him and then, he would forget her over the years. I had not yet understood that the loss of someone could haunt you for eternity.”
A confession was there, thrown out in the open. Caroline’s heart felt tight, tiptoeing on the edge of something she still wasn’t quite she wanted, or that Klaus even meant.
The blonde in New Orleans
“Who died in New Orleans?” She hated how her voice sounded small. Hated how it felt like she was jealous even though she wasn’t, because he made no real promise and she’s spent the last few years dating other men. No trust or loyalty was broken.
“Not you,” Klaus’s voice was rough. “No one important.”
“Klaus…” Caroline trailed off. She didn’t know if she wanted to pick at what he said like a scab, how she was so sure he was lying, but she wanted to believe that he wasn’t. What that meant for her. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“She was a distraction,” Klaus said firmly. His arms tightened around Caroline. “If I hadn’t been distracted, I would have noticed you were gone sooner.”
“I haven’t seen any minions since freshman year.”
Klaus smirked slightly, “Not exactly minions.”
The new thing to be outraged by brought some levity. Caroline had overnighted Klaus the last minion she had found kidneys sometime after first year midyear week, and he had backed off.
“Your barista and building security are compelled to text me each time you leave and return.”
“My barista?” The building security made sense—but the barista at the little coffee shop she went to everyday because Caroline had not yet mastered the right foam ratio to her lattes, that was a bit much.
Everything was a bit much. Klaus was always a bit much, always warm, knowing what to say that would make Caroline angry, but he never lied to her. He left Mystic Falls behind, left Elena alone. He gave Caroline space, so smug and confident that she would return to him.
But Caroline was a bit much. She was too anal, too loud, too mean. Too ambitious in ways that weren’t considered acceptable for women. Too insecure in every relationship she was ever in.
“I didn’t think you would come,” Caroline admitted softly.
Klaus stiffened, his fingers turned to fists gripping her skin as if he could keep her by his side forever by that alone. “I would have been there in a day, had Algirdas been a bit stupider. He knew my anger over Cami’s death would distract me for a few days. Enough that he managed to get you out of the country without me knowing.”
“Where are we?” Caroline asked, instead of trying to under who Cami was.
“Lithuania,” Klaus told her. “I believe that was the house—or the grounds of the house Maria and he lived in.”
“I would come for you anywhere, Caroline.” Klaus continued, ignoring Caroline shocked that she wasn’t in America, and instead in a country she could guarantee she would never be able to place on a map. “I told you, I intend to be your last love, and that has not changed. I will wait however long it takes, but to do so, you need to be alive.”
“You say that so easily,” Caroline murmured. “But what am I to you? Am I your last love? Or am I just going to be a distraction when there’s another blonde woman somewhere who’s going to call you out on your shit?”
“Any woman I have ever met, will ever meet could only pale in comparison to you, Caroline.” His voice lowered. “I am waiting for you to want me. If you want me to wait alone, all you have to do is tell me.”
He made it sound easy. He made it sound like it was like just choosing the restaurant for dinner, so simple. Which was always the problem with Klaus. He had the infuriating ability to always make everything seem so much simpler than it actually was. And he never lied to her about any of it, never pretended he was more than what he was. All he wanted from Caroline was for her to stop lying to herself, to live her full potential, far away from small towns, and small minds—and he was right.
He was always right about that stuff.
But it wasn’t easy, and it was not simple. Klaus had a line of enemies many centuries deep, he tended to be thorough in his revenge and that bore grudges and enemies. Enemies who would love to kill her, use her to get to Klaus.
Enemies who did.
Caroline pushed his hands off her, resettling herself so she was to eye with Klaus. She inspected him diligently, searching for answers to questions she didn’t know to ask, and he didn’t know how to answer. But was that okay? Was that okay to have eternity to figure out the questions, and wait for Klaus to know the answers?
She kissed him, slowly, gently. Klaus was still for a moment, before he deepened the kiss, his hand in her hair. A moment, perfect in suspension.
Caroline pulled away first, “Wait alone please. I know—I know I can’t… but please. I need just a bit more time.”
“Of course, love,” Klaus let out a breath. His disappointment rang through him like a bell.
“Maybe,” Caroline hawed, “Maybe you can visit me in New York sometime? And I…I have reading week in a few months, I could go to New Orleans?”
Simple, easy words. An opening towards forever, where they can work towards that.
“I think I can find some time,” Klaus smiled, and gods, was he beautiful when he smiled. Caroline found herself mirroring him.
Klaus’s smile became bigger, prouder when Caroline stalked towards Algirdas.
Klaus had Algirdas strapped down, in a version of the set up Caroline had been stuck into, except the vervain was falling on his face, waterboarding him.
“Look at me,” Caroline snapped. The minion in charge of the water supply shut it off. Algirdas, without his Daylight ring, was burning, his neck too weak to hold his head up.
“She’s talking to you, mate,” Klaus walked behind Algirdas, pushing the Vampire’s head up, his fingers digging into the open sores.
Caroline waited until Algirdas eyes focused on her, cleared from his current hell, but trepidation for the new one.
She walked closer to Algirdas, exaggerating the sway of her hips, feeling her Monster skim underneath her skin, practically humming.
This was the part that had always scared her before, how easy it was to go there, just simply walk past the borders that Elena and Bonnie built of what was a Good Vampire, into what was a Bad Vampire. Elena seemed to ignore the fact that each time Damon made a move, she expanded her definition of Good, but only for him.
“You didn’t come for Maria,” Caroline said softly. “You failed to save her. You failed her. And she died knowing you failed. She died knowing you weren’t fast enough—smart enough. You didn’t love her enough to save her. You just weren’t enough.”
Her hand in the left side of Algirdas chest was exploratory. Caroline had never reached into someone’s chest and found their heart. She wasn’t quite sure what a heart would feel like, but figured she could experiment.
The heart was smaller than she expected, gummy walls that when she tightened her hand on, constricted. Algirdas eyes were wide, dinner plates on his face. His lip was split from where he had bitten it, trying not to scream.
“And you’re going to die, knowing you still failed her. Maria’s been dead for centuries, and you couldn’t get revenge on her killer. You’re still not enough Algirdas. I’m alive, and you’ve just failed her again.”
Algirdas reared back, but Klaus pushed his head forward. Caroline looked the Vampire who kidnapped her in his eye, when she pulled his heart out.
When she finally moved her gaze off the dead man, she saw Klaus, looking at her like she was love incarnate.
Caroline felt herself smile back.